WSJ: Campbell Brown Is Aiding Parent Group For Tenure/Seniority Lawsuit

Not a surprise:

A new advocacy group is helping parents prepare a challenge to New York's teacher tenure and seniority laws, contending that they violate children's constitutional right to a sound basic education by keeping ineffective teachers in classrooms.

Campbell Brown, a former CNN anchor who has been a critic of job protections for teachers, launched the group, Partnership for Educational Justice, in December. She said six students have agreed to serve as plaintiffs, arguing they suffered from laws making it too expensive, time-consuming and burdensome to fire bad teachers.

The preparations to challenge the state's tenure laws this summer follow a landmark ruling in California earlier this month. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu struck down the state's laws on tenure, dismissal and seniority, saying they disproportionately saddled poor and minority students with incompetent teachers. Evidence that ineffective teachers hurt learning, he wrote, "shocks the conscience."

California unions that intervened in the case, Vergara v. California, said they would appeal, and legal analysts predicted the ruling would inspire similar suits around the country.

Carl Korn, spokesman for New York State United Teachers, said his union believes the Vergara decision will be overturned, and the facts are different in New York than in California. While he said that New York's new evaluation system has flaws, it aims to bolster teacher quality. 

"The system is designed to help all teachers improve, and for those who struggle or don't belong in the system, to remove them in an expedited hearing," he said. 

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, said by email: "It is a shame so many so-called 'reformers' can't find a way to do something that would actually help students, teachers and schools."

Ms. Brown wants a verdict in her group's case to spur legislators to come up with better education policies. "My hope is this would be a wake-up call to politicians who failed to solve these problems for years," she said. 

Her team has been meeting with parents to find plaintiffs. One is Jada Williams in Rochester, who wrote a seventh-grade essay complaining about teachers who she said gave no real instruction and failed to manage unruly students. Her mother, Carla, said in an interview: "When a child in class is educationally neglected, that's a criminal act."

David Welch, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who financed Students Matter, the advocacy group that filed the Vergara suit, has given Ms. Brown guidance, and came to a meeting of about 30 people at her apartment in April to discuss it, she said. A mother of two children in private school, Ms. Campbell said she gave seed money to the Partnership for Educational Justice. She declined to disclose other donors. She has applied for nonprofit status.

Jay Lefkowitz, a senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis, is leading the New York case pro bono. Mr. Lefkowitz, a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, fought for Wisconsin's school vouchers and prevailed through the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mr. Lefkowitz said "it boggles the mind" that in the New York education system the vast majority of teachers were rated effective or better last year even though 69% of students in grades three through eight didn't pass state proficiency tests.

"The system lacks integrity and students are being forced to pay the price," he said. Unions often note that many factors affect learning, such as poverty and parent involvement.

Mr. Lefkowitz said he plans to challenge statutes mandating that during budget cuts, districts must dismiss the newest teachers first, with no consideration of their performance. Unions have long argued that without seniority rules, districts would lay off more highly paid veterans to save money.

He said he will also challenge what he said are overly complicated disciplinary procedures that dissuade administrators from trying to revoke tenure; some of these cases have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. 

Union officials emphasize that tenure doesn't guarantee a job for life, but enforces due process to shield teachers from arbitrary firings, nepotism and vindictive bosses. A district may seek to revoke tenure if a teacher gets two bad annual ratings in a row. 

Mr. Lefkowitz plans to argue teachers are granted tenure before it is clear they deserve it. In New York, teachers generally get tenure at the end of three years of acceptable service, but principals can add another probationary year. 

In the California case, the plaintiffs brought an equal-protection claim, arguing that a disproportionate share of bad teachers end up in schools serving disadvantaged students. 

The New York constitution says children have a right to a "sound basic education." Mr. Lefkowitz plans to argue that laws leading to the retention of ineffective teachers hurt students no matter what their background. He said he plans to file the suit in New York Supreme Court in Albany.

I've dealt with some of this before in a post which you can see here.

I think the plaintiffs in this case will have a more difficult time getting the verdict they want because 

a) tenure takes longer to get in NY - many teachers are taking 4 or 5 years before they are getting it in NYC - and many teachers never get tenure at all and just leave the system and

b) APPR effectively ended tenure protections - teachers can be fired two years running if they're rated "ineffective"

The plaintiffs can argue that it costs millions to fire so-called "bad teachers" all they want.

Under APPR, it takes two years of "ineffective" ratings to fire teachers - something that is easily engineered the way the system was devised by the state.

Reformers can also claim that 69% of students were less than proficient on the state exams, so 69% of teachers must be less than effective all they want as well.

That argument is easily countered by the moves the governor and the Legislature made to acknowledge how awful the CCSS implementation was, something that directly affected the state test scores, as well as all the publicity surrounding the SED artificially setting the new CCSS test bar a lot higher than the one for the old tests.

I don't think Campbell Brown and her merry men and women in reform are going to have as easy a time in this kind of suit as the reformers had in the initial Vergara case hearing.

But that doesn't mean they're not going to try.

Daily News Editors - A Bloodthirsty Bunch Of War Criminals

There doesn't seem to be any bombing campaign, preemptive strike or out-and-out war the very serious men at Mort Zuckerman's Daily News don't like.

Yesterday in an editorial on Syria, they wrote the following:

The commander-in-chief of the United States of America is asking Congress for approval to punish the Syrian regime with the military might of the globe’s sole superpower. The Congress must authorize an attack.

President Obama’s grounds for striking the regime of Bashar Assad are sound beyond a reasonable doubt. In violation of long-standing international norms, the Syrian military targeted civilians with rocket-launched gas, killing more than 1,400 people, including hundreds of children.

There must be retribution so as to dramatically degrade Assad’s power, chemical and otherwise, and to set a cautionary precedent for the world’s like-minded others. Here were the President’s words, spoken Saturday in the Rose Garden:

“This attack is an assault on human dignity. It also presents a serious danger to our national security. It risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. It endangers our friends and our partners along Syria’s borders, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. It could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons, or their proliferation to terrorist groups who would do our people harm. . . . Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets.”

Those full truths stood in sharp contrast to the half measure Obama uttered in closing: “I’m ready to act in the face of this outrage.” Yes, military brass are set to let fly the missiles with but a presidential nod, but, no, having gone on bended knee to Congress, Obama will not be “ready” until the members vote yes to some plan of action.

Obama sought no such blessing when American forces helped oust Moammar Khadafy from Libya. He properly asserted presidential power to put U.S. forces into a fight without Capitol Hill’s formal backing. That was called a war. This, Obama has described as a limited “shot across the bow” and still he cedes some of the power that is central to his office.

His move was an unfortunate and politically necessary byproduct of a muddled Syrian policy that brought the American people suddenly to the brink of entering a war that had seemed of minimal critical interest, despite 100,000 deaths, despite Obama’s wish to see Assad deposed, despite Obama’s all too casual warning that Assad would cross a red line with use of chemical weapons.

Then came the mass carnage, along with Obama’s August surprise for a public who had so often heard him say that the tides of war and terrorism were receding. Virtually no one knew what the administration’s conflicting voices were talking about. In their wisdom, Americans overwhelmingly told pollsters they wanted congressional consultation. So this humbled President asked permission.

Obama must not be humbled further. Congress must support a cause that’s just, maintaining presidential prestige and America’s moral authority.

Let's unpack all the bloodthirsty language the very serious men at the DN engage in with this editorial and think about the implications of the language they use.

We must "punish" the Syrian regime with the "military might" of the "globe's sole superpower."

Obama's grounds for striking Syria "are sound beyond a reasonable doubt."

There must be "retribution."

Obama should do this attack just the way he did his attack on Libya - without Congressional authorization.

He can "assert presidential power to put U.S. forces into a fight without Capital Hill's backing."

This is "called war."

"Obama must not be humbled further" by asking for "permission" to attack Syria.

Wow - what a bloodthirsty editorial full of jingoistic nonsense that points to some seriously sick psyches that the very serious men at the DN have.

These guys truly think they have the right to call for an attack on anybody at any time for any reason, regardless of the Constitution or legal rationale.

This is all about showing how tough they are and how tough the U.S. is.

This is about "retribution" - about "punishing" an enemy and showing the world how tough we are, and by extension, how tough they are

We must not "embolden" our enemies by wavering.

Just attack now!

As I read this editorial, I couldn't help but think about this George Carlin piece about the Gulf War and how much it pertains to neo-con psychos like the very serious men at the New York Daily News:
 

What happened to these very serious men as children that they've grown up to be such bloodthirsty jingos who never met an act of military violence they didn't like?

Andrew Cuomo Declares War Against Public School Teachers

Why did Andrew Cuomo say he believes "failing" public schools deserve "the death penalty"?

At first, when I read on the Internet that Cuomo had this, I thought the writer meant he said something close to it in a hyperbolic way.

But no, Governor Cuomo actually said it:

“There is going to be have to be a death penalty for failing schools . . . where we say the children come first, before the bureaucracy,” Cuomo told reporters during a stop in suburban Buffalo late Thursday. “If the school fails, the school has to end.”

Cuomo said options for failing schools include a takeover by the state or a takeover by a charter school.

“I don’t want Albany to sit there and tell communities how to run their schools but I do feel comfortable sitting in Albany and saying failing schools is not an option,” Cuomo said.

Such an interesting phrase to use - "death penalty" - when talking about schools.

Why not ""failing schools deserve to be closed"?

Or "failing schools cannot be allowed to continue to fail"?

I would take issue with the simplicity of those statements, since there are many reasons why schools "fail" that often have nothing to do with the schools or the teachers teaching there.

But at least the language would be less inflammatory.

To say that "failing" schools deserve "the death penalty" amounts to a declaration of war by this governor against public schools and public school teachers.

Folks, he wants to exterminate some of us.

Seriously - just look at the language he used.

Language always gives you away and the language Little Andy chose here gives him away as a  pro-charter, pro-education deform, anti-teacher, anti-union corporatist who wants to destroy the public school system and the teachers in it.

That he's purposely using language that once defined something his father was famously opposed to - the real "death penalty" for convicted criminals - is even more concerning.

It's his way of saying "I am not father, I am not Hamlet on the Hudson, I am no liberal commie pinko - I am a tough guy with tough policies who plans to get tough on 'failing' schools and put them to death."

In the short term, this language and this statement is aimed at Buffalo.

As I conjectured a month and a half ago, it seems obvious that Governor Cuomo and NYSED Commissioner King plan a state takeover of the Buffalo school district.

Cuomo and King have been pissed at Buffalo ever since that side deal the district made with the union over APPR and now they plan to get even by taking over the district, killing off the public schools and opening up charter schools either run by or patronized by their hedge fund cronies.

In the long term, though, it is a declaration of war by Governor Cuomo against teachers.

APPR was of course a strike against teachers and schools in NY State.

Forcing an APPR system on NYC teachers was a strike against NYC teachers.

But Cuomo has ratcheted up the level of animosity and hostility here by using such inflammatory language.

It is high time we return the favor.

If Governor Cuomo thinks it is time some schools be given the "death penalty" for struggles that are often beyond their means to fix, then it is time for teachers of all political ideologies to get together and help pull the plug on the 2014 Cuomo re-election plan and the Cuomo 2016 presidential plan.

Andrew Cuomo is a thug and a bully and a crook, that we've known for a while.

Now, after the "death penalty for schools" statement, he is also a war criminal against public schools.

It is time to put an end to his Reign of Terror.

How in heaven's sake he ever thought that "death penalty" was a proper phrase to use when talking about schools, students and teachers is beyond me.

But it does give you insight into the violent man he is in his heart.

Thatcher Funeral To Be Privatized

With the news of former British Prime Minister Margaret 'Let The Rich Get Richer" Thatcher's death today comes this:

Well said, Ken.

Morrissey responded to the news with a letter:

Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the ivory trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out. She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone—and was sailing AWAY from the islands! When the young Argentinean boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs-up sign for the British press.

Iron? No. Barbaric? Yes. She hated feminists even though it was largely due to the progression of the women's movement that the British people allowed themselves to accept that a prime minister could actually be female. But because of Thatcher, there will never again be another woman in power in British politics, and rather than opening that particular door for other women, she closed it.

Thatcher will only be fondly remembered by sentimentalists who did not suffer under her leadership, but the majority of British working people have forgotten her already, and the people of Argentina will be celebrating her death. As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity.

And some in Britain responded like this:

Me, all I can say is, the universe sure does have a sense of humor.

Here Thatcher lived to 87 and Kissinger is still kicking around in his wheelchair on the Upper East Side but Joe Strummer died at 50.

I know lots of people are playing The English Beat and Morrissey to mark her passing.

I'm going to play Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash

Rumsfeld Wants Kudos For Iraq War Screw-Ups

Unfreakingbelievable:

As noted earlier, on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, marking a war that saw up to 134,000 Iraqi civilians killed and has cost the U.S. $2 trillion and counting, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tweeted that “all who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

So glad Gates Foundation Education Week decided to go to Rummy to get "leadership lessons".

Apparently one Rumsfeld can pass along is how to be a clueless asshole.

All those deaths, all that money wasted, the car bombs are STILL going off in Iraq - and Rumsfeld wants a pat on the back for a "job well done!"

You can't make this stuff up.

I don't know what's worse - Rumsfeld wanting a pat on the back for the Iraq war or Gates Foundation Education Week thinking he'd be a good go-to for "leadership lessons."

This Is Why They Want Bradley Manning And Julian Assange Silenced And Imprisoned

The Guardian reports the following:

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus's "eyes and ears out on the ground" in Iraq.

"They worked hand in hand," said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. "I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there ... the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture."

Additional Guardian reporting has confirmed more details of how the interrogation system worked. "Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee," claimed Samari, talking for the first time in detail about the US role in the interrogation units.

"Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts."

 Is it just me or do those allegations, if true, amount to war crimes by Petraeus and Rumsfeld?

So glad Education Week got an interview with Rummy last week about education leadership in schools!

He sure does have a lot to teach us about illegal detentions, torture and war crimes.

No wonder the Obama administration is doing everything in its power to get Assange and they've already got Manning.

The evidence of war crimes is mounting.

Barack Obama As Michael Corleone

Today Barack Obama was inaugurated to his second term as president.

He used a Bible once owned by Martin Luther King for the ceremony, a copy of the Good Book that King's family said was MLK's "traveling Bible".

Simultaneously as Obama took the oath of office with his hand on King's Bible, he ordered this:

 SANAA, Yemen — A U.S. drone airstrike on a vehicle Monday east of Yemen’s capital of Sanaa killed three suspected al-Qaida militants and wounded two others, according to security officials.

The airstrike was the third to target al-Qaida militants in the area since Saturday and indicated an uptick in the U.S. military battle against the terror organization in Yemen. On Saturday, two U.S. drone strikes killed eight people, including two known al-Qaida militants, in Marib province.

Gotta love the pathology of Barack Obama, using the King Bible for his oath of office even as he's having drone strikes carried out.

He's like Michael Corleone acting as godfather to his nephew even as he's "settling business" with the heads of the other families and getting ready to kill his nephew's father, Carlo.



Obama called for greater equality for all in his speech to the nation today.

He must mean greater equality for everybody except those brown people he keeps having killed in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan...

Barack Obama And Martin Luther King

Glenn Greenwald looks at Martin Luther King's April 4, 1967 speech in Riverside Church on American imperialism and militancy and compares King's words with President Obama's policies:

King called the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today", as well as the leading exponent of "the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long" (is there any surprise this has been whitewashed from his legacy?). He emphasized that his condemnations extended far beyond the conflict in Southeast Asia: "the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit." He insisted that no significant social problem - wealth inequality, gun violence, racial strife - could be resolved while the US remains "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift" - a recipe, he said, for certain "spiritual death". For that reason, he argued, "it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war." That's because:

"If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over."

Working against US imperialism was, he said, "the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions." For King, opposing US violence in the world was not optional but obligatory: "We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy . . . ." The entire speech is indescribably compelling and its applicability to contemporary US behavior obvious. I urge everyone who hasn't already done so to take the time to read it.

Barack Obama's grand inaugural ceremony will take place today on the holiday memorializing King's birthday. Obama will always be linked in history to King because his election (and re-election) as America's first African-American president is, standing alone, an inspiring by-product of King's work on racial justice. But this symbolic link has another, less inspiring symbolic meaning: Obama's policies are a manifestation of exactly the militaristic mindset which King so eloquently denounced. Obama has always been fond of invoking King's phrase "fierce urgency of now", yet ironically, that is lifted from this anti-war speech, one that stands as a stinging repudiation of the continuous killing and violence Obama has spent the last four years unleashing on many countries around the world (Max Blumenthal suggested that Obama's second inaugural speech be entitled "I have a drone").

And just so that the consequences of Barack Obama's drone bombings aren't theoretical, here's a couple of photos of victims of Obama's drone strikes:

 On November 15, 2012, Dennis Kucinch addressed the Congress on these policies:

“American drones in Pakistan have killed as many as 3,378 people. Drones in Yemen have killed as many as 1,952 people. Drones in Somalia have killed as many as 170 people. We've not declared war on any of these nations, but our weapons have killed innocent civilians in all of them. Highly reputable research shows that the number of high-level targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is estimated at about 2 percent.”

“According to The Washington Post, the Obama administration is working on efforts to institutionalize the practice of targeted killings by unmanned drones abroad. The volume of these killings challenges the morality and the legality of the attacks. We are creating a precedent for other nations that are developing the same technology. China has just unveiled a new drone”, he said.

 “The drone program has thus far been conducted with no oversight from Congress or any judicial body. Congress has a constitutional responsibility to ensure that programs that are being conducted in the name of our Nation are legal, transparent, and accountable.

On the day that Barack Obama takes his second oath of office with his murderous hand on a Bible once owned by Martin Luther King, I think it's important to point out that Barack Obama has more in common with Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush than Martin Luther King.

Obama Continues Bush Illegal Rendition Practice

I am so glad we re-elected Barack Obama rather than the "unthinkable" Mitt Romney:

The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators.

U.S. agents accused the men — two of them Swedes, the other a longtime resident of Britain — of supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia in Somalia that Washington considers a terrorist group. Two months after their arrest, the prisoners were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, then clandestinely taken into custody by the FBI and flown to the United States to face trial.
The secret arrests and detentions came to light Dec. 21 when the suspects made a brief appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom.

The men are the latest example of how the Obama administration has embraced rendition — the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Renditions are taking on renewed significance because the administration and Congress have not reached agreement on a consistent legal pathway for apprehending terrorism suspects overseas and bringing them to justice.
 
Congress has thwarted President Obama’s pledge to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and has created barriers against trying al-Qaeda suspects in civilian courts, including new restrictions in a defense authorization bill passed last month. The White House, meanwhile, has resisted lawmakers’ efforts to hold suspects in military custody and try them before military commissions.

The impasse and lack of detention options, critics say, have led to a de facto policy under which the administration finds it easier to kill terrorism suspects, a key reason for the surge of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Renditions, though controversial and complex, represent one of the few alternatives.

“In a way, rendition has become even more important than before,” said Clara Gutteridge, director of the London-based Equal Justice Forum, a human rights group that investigates national security cases and that opposes the practice.

Drone bomb strikes, a kill list, illegal renditions and warrantlesss wiretapping - I'm so glad a Democrat is in office so that I don't have to worry my head about any of those things.

Of course if this were Mitt Romney, John McCain or George Bush doing it, I would be screaming about war crimes.

But Barack Obama is my guy, and he's a good guy, so I just let this stuff go by and talk about how crazy those Republicans are instead.

When Barack Obama spoke of the murdered children at Sandy Hook Elementary, he said the following:

"I think anybody who was up in Newtown, who talked to the parents, who talked to the families understands that something fundamental in America has to change," Obama told David Gregory on NBC's "Meet the Press." "And all of us have to do some soul searching, including me as president, that we allow a situation in which 20 precious small children are getting gunned down in a classroom. 

A noble sentiment from our Nobel Peace Prize winning president.

How about a fundamental change to American foreign policy that uses drone bomb strikes against terrorism suspects and kills children in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere?

Children like the ones described here.https://twitter.com/dronestream/status/279258960916271105/photo/1

Or here.https://twitter.com/dronestream/status/278727931818278913/photo/1

Or here. https://twitter.com/i/#!/dronestream/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com%2F1jKbpuIz

Adam Lanza murdered 20 children at Sandy Hook in a horrific event.

We don't know how many children Barack Obama has had murdered through U.S. drone policy strikes, because the U.S. government is very secretive about casualties.

But it's more than 20, we know that.

We know that the Obama administration specializes in targeting funerals of drone bomb victims with another drone bomb strike, that they also target first responders to drone bomb strikes who attempt to help the victims with another drone bomb strike.

We know the policy causes and is meant to cause terror all across the globe - don't screw with us or this will happen to you.

Now is rendering and detaining suspects without charges, interrogating them without informing them of their rights or giving them legal counsel, and trying them on evidence obtained illegally better than the drone bomb campaign the Obama administration has engaged in?

Absolutely not.

But the Obama administration says that because Congress will not act the way they want on WoT issues, they have no choice but to do one of these two things.

If this were George Bush or Mitt Romney or John McCain doing the rendering, the murders from the sky, the slaughtering of innocent children like the ones pictured and detailed in the above links, liberals and progressives would be screaming holy hell over it.

But because this is Barack Obama engaged in the rendition and drone bomb murder and the slaughtering of innocent children like the ones pictured and detailed in the above links, there is relative silence from those same liberals and progressives.

Barack Obama is a war criminal and a murderer, he belongs in a prison cell block along with Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley, John Yoo and Richard Nixon's corpse.

Where is the outrage from the left?

Democrats Keep Conceding - Obama Wants To Cut Social Security

 Same old same old.

Democrats keep conceding on all their so-called deal-breaker issues and keep giving the GOP everything they want in this fake "fiscal cliff crisis."

President Obama said he wouldn't accept any fiscal cliff deal that didn't raise taxes on families making more than $250,000.

Republicans balked at that level, so Dems raised that threshold to $400,000

But that wasn't good enough for Republicans either, so now Dems have agreed to raise taxes only on people making more than $450,000.

But that still isn't good enough for Republicans.

The Washington Post reports they are holding out for a $550,000 threshold, and since Dems have conceded on almost every other point, Republicans think they can get it.

In addition, Dems were demanding estate taxes go up from their low levels, but Republicans have fought that and the Post reports the following:

Democrats also relented on the politically sensitive issue of the estate tax, according to a detailed account of the Democratic offer obtained by The Washington Post. They promised instead to hold a vote in the Senate that would guarantee that taxes on inherited estates remain at their current low levels, a key GOP demand.

One point Dems have so far held their ground is on Social Security - but only because they plan to use Social Security cuts as a future bargaining chip.

Republicans want to change the way inflation increases are calculated so that Social Security recipients will get less money each year - this way, there will be more money for tax cuts for rich people.

President Obama is a big fan of this change as well, having made the offer as part of the Grand Bargain he tried to make with John Boehner a few years ago as well as part of the Grander Bargain he tried to make with Boehner a few weeks ago.

But Senate Dems fought changing that calculation in this part of the fiscal cliff negotiation and Republicans dropped the demand, realizing that fighting to cut Social Security while simultaneously fighting tax increases on rich people wasn't a winning political strategy.

Don't worry GOPers - according to the Washington Post, the president and his merry men and women plan to give you those cuts to Social Security in short order:

 Obama had offered to include chained CPI in the big deficit-reduction package he had been negotiating with House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) earlier this month. Obama endorsed the idea again Sunday, in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” calling it a tough decision he was willing to make “in pursuit of strengthening Social Security for the long term.”

But many Democrats say they would go along with the idea only as part of a far-reaching deal that also included at least $1.2 trillion in new tax revenue over the next decade. The deal under discussion Sunday would raise far less than that, somewhere between $600 billion and $800 billion.

“Chained CPI should be part of the larger discussion about the future of Social Security,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), “not just a casual bargaining chip here at the last minute.”

So Obama and the Dems plan a sell-out on Social Security and they, like Republicans, want to make sure older people live on generic dog food and food pantry offerings - they just want to get more from Republicans in the bargain.

Where are all those liberals and progressives, the ones who said they would hold Obama to his alleged progressive principles after his re-election, the ones who said Romney would be an "unthinkable" alternative to Obama?

They are effectively silent as Obama and the Dems concede on every major point and get ready to sell out working and middle class Americans so that the wealthy and the corporations - the 1% - can continue to rape and pillage the rest of us.

So far, Obama has cut food stamps in order to fund his Race to the Top education reforms, is going to force Americans without health care to buy shitty private insurance, is looking to cut Social Security and Medicare, and has promoted public school privatization.

In the foreign affairs sphere, Obama murders innocents every month in drone bombs strikes - including children just like the ones killed in that awful Sandy Hook shooting earlier in the month.

He has a "kill list" and has declared he can murder any American at any time for any reason if the government suspects - just suspects - that person is guilty of terrorism.

He has extended warrantless wiretapping and expanded the state surveillance apparatus in the name of "keeping us safe," and has condoned the torture of Bradley Manning after declaring publicly that Manning is guilty of a crime the government hadn't yet tried him for.

And let's not forget how Obama's DOJ and DHS helped coordinate the Occupy Wall Street crackdowns all across the country.

I get the part about Romney being a horrific president.

But considering his record in both domestic and foreign affairs, Barack Obama is pretty horrific too.

Oh well - thank God we got him re-elected instead of that "unthinkable" alternative.

We'll make sure we hold him accountable to his campaign promises and alleged progressive principles, won't we?

NY Times: Obama Looked To Codify "Kill List" Before The Election In Case Romney Won

Believing few things are more important than institutionalizing his drone bomb campaign that slaughters innocents the world over in order to keep us "safe" from terrorism, President Obama and his advisers worked very hard to codify the rules of the program pre-election:

 A report in the New York Times on Sunday describes how, leading up to the recent US election, the Obama administration made a determined push to codify guidelines for its targeted assassination (aka 'Kill List') program and clarify rules for the use of US predator drones strikes overseas.

 Critics of the US drone program have long made the argument that Demoractic supporters of the President would perhaps lose their enthusiasm (or passive acceptance) for the "kill list" program if it was placed in the hands of a Republican president like the party's most recent hopeful, Mitt Romney.
The Times reporting on Sunday seems to indicate that the fear of handing over an amiguous and secretive assassination program to a Republican administration was also shared by some top officials in the Obama administration.

Reported by the paper's Scott Shane, the article says that the "attempt to write a formal rule book for targeted killing began last summer after news reports on the drone program, started under President George W. Bush and expanded by Mr. Obama, revealed some details of the president’s role in the shifting procedures for compiling “kill lists” and approving strikes."

Though the Obama administration has continually sought to protect the secrecy of certain details of its program, it has simultaneously defended its usefulness in combating international terrorism. This contradiction has been seized by international human rights groups, US civil libertarians, journalists, and the United Nations, calling on the US government to come clean on how it justifies the extrajudicial killing of individuals--both foreign citizens and American nationals--in countries like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and others.

Shane reports that "the president and top aides believe [the programs] should be institutionalized," and that efforts to do "seemed particularly urgent when it appeared that Mitt Romney might win the presidency."

The hypocrisy of liberals and progressives on this issue astounds me.

Change one word in the Times article - switch "Obama" for "Bush" - and you can bet that liberals and progressives would be up in arms over this program.

But because it's their guy in charge, it's a good program, a necessary program, one that is used judiciously by a judicious president.

Bullshit.

Read this Glenn Greenwald column from late September on a Stanford/NYU study of the consequences of the drone bomb campaign on civilians, on the propaganda the Obama administration uses to justify this slaughter of innocents, on their targeting of funerals and even emergency responders to initial drone attacks, on the complicity of the media in this propaganda campaign and then tell me this program is less harmful and murderous because a Democrat is heading it as opposed to a Republican.

Here is a taste:

Significantly, the report says the prime culprit of these evils is what it calls the "dramatic escalation" of the drone campaign by the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate - escalated not just in sheer numbers (in less than four years, Obama "has reportedly carried out more than five times" the number ordered by Bush in eight years), but more so, the indiscriminate nature of the strikes. As Tuesday's Guardian article on this report states: it "blames the US president, Barack Obama, for the escalation of 'signature strikes' in which groups are selected merely through remote 'pattern of life' analysis."

 The report is equally damning when documenting the attempts of the Obama administration to suppress information about its drone victims, and worse, to actively mislead when they deign selectively to release information. Recognizing the difficulty of determining the number of civilian deaths with exactitude - due to "the opaqueness of the US government about its targeted killing program" as well as the inaccessibility of the region - it nonetheless documents that "the numbers of civilians killed are undoubtedly far higher than the few claimed by US officials." In other words, the administration's public statements are false: "undoubtedly" so. As the LA Times summarizes the study's findings today: "Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged."

Before the election, I attempted to ask a few people who claimed they were voting for Obama over Romney despite his education policies because on other issues, he was the clear moral choice about the immorality of the drone bomb campaign.

I didn't get much response from anybody.

I suspect it's because they either live in denial that this is happening or know it but do not wish to acknowledge it publicly.

The hypocrisy Obama supporters, liberals and progressives on this issue is just infuriating.

As Greenwald notes, not only do these people ignore the crimes and murders perpetrated by the Obama administration under the guise of the War on Terror, but they actively cheer them (as at the DNC.)

And again, it's with this moral superiority complex - we're more reflective and thoughtful about this stuff then the Bushies, Obama reads Aquinas before ordering the strikes, so somehow this has a moral justification that Bush's policies didn't.

I don't see anything moral about this drone bomb campaign or the man in charge of it.

Rather I see a war criminal who is murdering lots of innocent people on a weekly basis who belongs in a jail cell next to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Hadley, Yoo, et al.

Why Do Liberals Let Obama Get Away With This Bush League Stuff?

We have a president who has institutionalized the slaughter of thousands of innocents in the name of national security and the War on Terror.

We have a president with a personal "kill list" who orders the murder of at least one person on that list every week - again, in the name of national security and the War on Terror.

This president has declared that he has the right to assassinate any American at any time in any place for any reason - so long as the president believes this person is guilty of acts of terrorism and cannot be taken alive into custody. This declaration of extraordinary and unconstitutional powers is also made in the name of national security and the War on Terror.

This president even ordered the assassination of a 16 year old boy, an American citizen - the son of an American man who was never indicted, let alone brought to trial or convicted on any crimes, but was nonetheless killed by the American government because he was believed to be a "terrorist".

This man's son, a 16 year old boy, was later targeted by this president and killed by a drone bomb strike in Yemen.  His 17 year old cousin was killed along with him.

This president's administration first lied about the ages of these boys to make the murders seem less horrific, but once caught in their lies by the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, they admitted they had killed two teenagers.

They nonetheless continue to defend these killings as justified, saying that's it too bad this kid had to die but he should've "had a more responsible father."  

This kind of thing makes this president's statements on the senseless killing of another American teenager, Trayvon Martin, seem as disingenuous as they no doubt were.

In case you haven't figured out the timeline by now, this president who has engaged in the systematic slaughter of innocents, who is busy institutionalizing that slaughter so that those who come after him can continue it with legal justification in place, who seems to relish his "tough guy" role as judge, jury and executioner in the so-called War on Terror, is Barack Obama.

You know, the guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago.

Had George W. Bush engaged in this kind of murderous behavior, liberals would have been up in arms calling for his impeachment and imprisonment.

But because the president engaging in this murderous activity is a Democrat, they remain silent, making believe they do not know what is happening.

Or worse, they justify it as practical and necessary.

I keep seeing people I respect, thoughtful people with progressive values, endorsing this murderous president as the better alternative to his opponent, Mitt Romney.

Obama is, as the cliche goes, the lesser of two evils and many people are deciding to hold their noses and vote for him under that rationale.

I cannot do that.

Barack Obama is a murderer and a war criminal.

If there were justice in the world, he would be in a jail cell in Guantanamo Bay alongside Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hadley, Rumsfeld, Yoo, et al. having Rage Against The Machine albums blasted at him 24/7 for the rest of his life.

But there is no justice, and so, instead many Americans are faced with the choice of voting for him because he is the lesser of the two evils available to us on election day.

Well, I cannot choose the lesser evil.

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: The lesser of two evils is still evil.

And make no mistake, Barack Obama is evil.

Just ask the relatives of the dead drone bomb victims Obama had slaughtered in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the name of national security and the War on Terror.

Is Obama Losing?

I see that quite a few national polls have swung in Mitt Romney's favor since he trounced Barack Obama in a political debate last week.

I see that some swing state polls have begin to swing in Romney's direction too.

Of course I know that just two weeks ago, the media and the political establishment had all but written the election off as a win for Obama, so I have a difficult time seeing how one bad performance in a debate could swing the polls that much.

But I do know one thing.

The arrogant, out-of-touch elitist who showed up at the debate - I'm talking about the one with the "D" after his name, not the "R" - needed a wake-up call and maybe the swing in polls is just that.

I am a Democrat who has only voted for Democrats going back to 1988 (1986 if you count local elections.)

I am NOT voting for Barack Obama this year.

First of all, I don't consider him a Democrat.

Anybody who wants to gut Social Security and Medicare, hand out billions of dollars to the Too Big To Fail Banks while creating a mortgage relief program that screws middle and working class homeowners, renominates Ben Bernanke at the Fed, nominates Timmeh Geithner at Treasury (Goldman's man on the job!), promotes the privatization of the public education system through his Race to the Top program, jails Bradley Manning for years without any charges  wages war against whistleblowers with a tenacity the Bushies couldn't even muster, declares he has the right to assassinate any American any time anywhere if he declares them a "terrorist," puts together a "kill list" of "terrorists" he wants assassinated, and drops drone bombs on innocent men, women and children in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere is not a Democrat to my mind.

That kind of guy is a Republican and I won't be voting for him, no matter who is running against him.

Secondly, Obama is one of the most arrogant pricks on the planet (if you don't think so, take a look again at the debate and read the accounts of how he had refused preparation for it and told his aides afterwards that he thought he had won.)  He truly is a narcissist who is convinced of his own righteousness and awesomeness and just can't understand why everybody else doesn't agree with him.

As a teacher who has watched Obama vilify my profession, I know that many teachers have tried to tell this man about the damage Race to the Top is doing to education and students.  Obama is pushing unproven, unpiloted measures like teacher evaluations tied to test scores onto the whole nation and is unwilling to listen to anybody, even an expert like Diane Ravitch, who tries to tell him he is wrong to do this.

Sometimes Obama just seems completely out-of-touch about the consequences his policies are having.  For example, he said during the State of the Union this past year that teachers need to stop teaching to the tests, that children deserve an education that is not limited by this kind of rote learning, and yet, Obama's own RttT policy ensures that this kind of teaching will happen because it promotes standardized tests in every grade, K-12, in every subject, and ties teacher evaluations to the scores.

Is Obama unaware that this is the consequence of his policy when he says that teachers should stop teaching to the test?  Is he actually aware of this and dissembling when he says this?

Dunno the answer to these questions, but I do know that there are two possibilities:

Either Obama has no idea the damage that is being done by his education policies and pursues them anyway or he does know and he lies about them.

Either possibility disturbs me and is pretty much emblematic of his whole presidency and indeed himself as an individual.

That was on display at the debate where he looked bored, pissed off to be there, and frankly mad that the rest of the country didn't already see the brilliance of his policies and call the debate off before it started.

So it's hard to know if the poll swing in recent days means much or if it's just the media making a horse race out of what seemed to be a rout in the making, but I do know one thing.

If the poll swing and the drubbing Obama is taking from the media, Dems and Democratic supporters alike serves to wake this arrogant, elitist, out-of-touch man from his "awesomeness fantasies" about himself and his policies, that's a good thing.

That still won't make me vote for him.

I don't vote for pro-privatization, anti-labor war criminals who murder innocent men, women and children on a "kill list."

But maybe a wake-up call will mean Obama will stop listening to only himself and start listening to some of the people who supported him in '08 who he know seems to disdain.

And if that happens, maybe, just maybe, a second Obama term won't be as damaging as the first one was.

The Hypocrisy Of Campbell Brown

Eduwonk interviewed Campbell Brown post-WSJ op-ed.

Brown continues to say over and over that teachers unions are "protecting sexually predatory teachers" in the interview.

She agrees that she should have disclosed that her husband, Dan Senor, former Iraq war spokesman for the Bush administration and current Romney adviser, is a board member of the New York chapter of Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst, but says that is immaterial to her argument - teachers unions protect sexual predators:

Critics have seized on your husband’s [Dan Senor] affiliation with the New York chapter of Students First to discredit you. In retrospect, should you have disclosed his role as a board member in the op-ed?

Yes. Absolutely. But tell me why this matters? This is just an attempt to distract people from the problem. The teachers union is protecting these teachers and they have to stop.

Neither Brown nor Eduwonk bring up the supreme irony in all of this - Brown's husband Dan sits on the board of a group run by Michelle Rhee who was accused by a federal inspector general of helping to "fix" sexual misconduct allegations made against her then boyfriend and now husband, former NBA star and current Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson, when he was running a Sacramento charter school, including using Americorps funds to cover up Johnson's alleged sexual misconduct.

Here is the Congressional committee report detailing those allegations and the NY Times coverage of that report.

Is the allegation in the Congressional report that Rhee helped cover up her husband's sexual misconduct when he headed a charter school "relevant" to the discussion we're having over whether teachers unions, by insisting upon due process for teachers accused of sexual misconduct, are "protecting" sexual predators?

Absolutely.

If Brown is going to accuse a group of protecting sexual predators and her husband sits on the board of a group run by a woman who has been accused by a Congressional committee of protecting a sexual predator, then that surely is relevant to not only the issue being discussed but the credibility of Brown to discuss it.

But apparently neither Brown nor Eduwonk think this is the case.

The hypocrisy these people in the education reform movement exhibit knows no bounds.

That Campbell Brown was given one of the top slots at Andy Cuomo's education reform committee forum to attack teachers unions for protecting sexual predators when she herself has a connection to a group run by a woman who has been accused of protecting a sexual predator says all you need to know about Andy Cuomo's education reform committee and says all you need to know about Campbell Brown.

Neither Campbell nor the Cuomo education reform committee are looking to protect children or put students first.

They're looking to attack unions and use any method or argument at their disposal to destroy them.

That the argument they've chosen this time happens to apply to one of their own (the infamous Michelle Rhee) doesn't seem to bother them in the least.

Why Does Michelle Rhee Protect Sexual Predators (AKA, Her Husband, Kevin Johnson)?

Seriously.

I assume Campbell Brown will get right on this and write an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal calling for the firing of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson.

Obama Kills 12 People This Weekend

Our Nobel Peace Prize Winning President continues to slaughter "terrorists":

Ten more people have been killed by a US drone strike against suspected militants in Pakistan, with the aircraft firing its missiles into a gathering mourning one of two fighters killed in a similar atttack the previous day.

Two Pakistani intelligence officials say four missiles were fired at the village of Mana Raghzai in South Waziristan near the border with Afghanistan on Sunday morning.

At the time of the attack, suspected militants had gathered to offer condolences to the brother of a militant commander killed during another US unmanned drone attack on Saturday. The brother was one of those who died in the Sunday morning attack. The Pakistani officials said two of the dead were foreigners and the rest were Pakistani.

It brought to 12 the total number of people killed in two days and was the sixth American drone strike over the last two weeks. The US government considers the drone campaign a vital tool in the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Paul Harris of The Guardian puts the president's slaughter of civilians in some context:

Yet it is the drone programme and "kill list" that have emerged as most central to Obama's hardline national security policy. In January 2009, when Obama came to power, the drone programme existed only for Pakistan and had seen 44 strikes in five years. With Obama in office it expanded to Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia with more than 250 strikes. Since April there have been 14 strikes in Yemen alone.

Civilian casualties are common. Obama's first strike in Yemen killed two families who were neighbours of the target. One in Pakistan missed and blew up a respected tribal leader and a peace delegation. He has deliberately killed American citizens, including the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in September last year, and accidentally killed others, such as Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman.

The drone operation now operates out of two main bases in the US, dozens of smaller installations and at least six foreign countries. There are "terror Tuesday" meetings to discuss targets which Obama's campaign manager, David Axelrod, sometimes attends, lending credence to those who see naked political calculation involved.

Yet for some, politics seems moot. Obama has shown himself to be a ruthless projector of national security powers at home and abroad, but the alternative in the coming election is Republican Mitt Romney.

"Whoever gets elected, whether it's Obama or Romney, they are going to continue this very dangerous path," said Radack. "It creates a constitutional crisis for our country. A crisis of who we are as Americans. You can't be a free society when all this happens in secret."

Those of you prepared to re-elect Barack Obama because he is the lesser of two evils in an election match-up with Mitt Romney should note that even the lesser of two evils is still "evil."

And given the slaughter Barack Obama orders on a weekly basis, given the Bush administration surveillance state apparatus Obama has expanded, given the fascistic and secretive tendencies this man has, he is most definitely evil and belongs in a Gitmo jail cell next to George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld.

Axelrod, the political operative, attending the "Terror Tuesday" meetings.

That tells you everything you need to know about the policy and the people involved.

Nobel Peace-Prize Winning Obama Continues To Have Innocents Slaughtered

While Obama enjoys his mac&cheese, ham, turkey, and seven kinds of desserts at his Thanksgiving dinner at the White House, here is what he is ordering the U.S. military to do:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Six children were among seven civilians killed in a NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Thursday.

The deaths occurred on Wednesday in Zhare District of Kandahar Province, an area described by coalition forces as largely pacified in recent months, and two insurgents were also killed, the Afghan officials said.

A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, Master Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, said the authorities were aware of the episode and had sent a team to the district to investigate. He said ISAF had not previously issued a news release on the deaths.

Zalmai Ayoubi, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar, said that a NATO reconnaissance aircraft spotted five militants planting mines in the village of Siacha, in Zhare District on Wednesday. The plane targeted the insurgents, killing two and wounding a third, and then pursued the other two suspects as they carried their injured comrade away.

“The plane chased them, the insurgents entered a street where children were playing and as a result of its shooting, seven people have been killed, including six children, and two girls also have been injured,” Mr. Ayoubi said. The victims were members of two families.

Abdul Samad, an uncle of four of the children who were killed, disputed the government’s version of the attack. He said his relatives were working in fields near their village when they were attacked without warning by an aircraft.

His brother-in-law, Mohammad Rahim, 50, had his two sons and three daughters with him. They were between 4 and 12 years old and all were killed, except an 8-year-old daughter, who was badly wounded, Mr. Samad said.

“There were no Taliban in the field, this is a baseless allegation that the Taliban were planting mines,” Mr. Samad said. “I have been to the scene and haven’t found a single bit of evidence of bombs or any other weapons. The Americans did a serious crime against innocent children, they will never ever be forgiven.”

This guy won a Nobel Peace Prize?

What a joke.

Obama ought to be in a jail cell for war criminals, right next to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz and the rest.

You can imagine the names people would call any terrorist who was responsible for the killing of innocent American children.

But what do they call Obama, a man who is responsible for just that, sans the "American" part?

Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Obama The Dictator

He's more and more like George W, isn't he:

WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

If the president does it, it's legal.

That's the Obama theory of executive power.

That was George W Bush's too.

And Nixon's.

No wonder Arne Duncan thinks he can extort states to agree to his Race to the Top guidelines if they want waivers to the NCLB regulations that will soon have 90% of the nation's schools declared "failing."

Under the Obama theory of governance, cabinet secretaries get to make law or change the ones they don't like.

But that just ain't right.

As Rick Hess pointed out here, cabinet secretaries are not given the constitutional powers to make law.

Neither is the president.

The Congress is.

And even if the president or his cabinet secretaries think that the Congress is not acting in a timely manner to legislate, the Constitution does not give them the power to create law in the Congress's place.

Just as the Constitution doesn't give the president the right to declare war.

But I guess following the Constitution is an archaic practice these days.

People who want the president to follow the Constitution in matters of war and domestic policy are hopelessly wedded to the status quo and just don't care about the nation's security and welfare.

And one only have one shot to educate our kids or save the Libyan people, so we just can't afford to wait for the Congress to act on these matters.

This is what empire looks like when it is heading toward fascism and autocracy.

How Come?

How come when Osama bin Laden plans and carries out an attack that kills 3,000 Americans, he is branded a "terrorist," hunted down by the U.S. after billions of dollars and two wars are started to find him and eventually found and summarily executed mafia style in a compound in Pakistan, but when innocent Pakistanis are wounded or killed in drone attacks ordered by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama, nobody calls the president a "terrorist"?

I'm glad Osama is not around to plan and carry out more terror attacks.

I bet many Pakistanis will feel the same way when Obama is gone from power.

From McClatchy in December, 2010:

There's been a massive ramp-up in drone strikes under the Obama administration, a weapon the U.S. considers highly effective, particularly against Taliban and al Qaida extremists based across the border from Afghanistan in Pakistan's remote tribal area.

There was no way of verifying the stories of the drone victims who've come forward. They all denied links to militants and claimed that the strikes were hitting mostly civilians. They described a terrifying existence under the drones in North Waziristan, the focus of the strikes.

A 13-year-old boy, Saddam Hussain, said that he lost his 10-month-old niece and sister-in-law in a strike on their house on the night of Oct. 9, in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan. Hussain carried a large picture of the baby girl with him.

"The drones patrol day and night. The sound comes when they fly lower down. Sometimes we see six in the air all at once," Saddam said. "When they come down, people run out of their houses, even at night."

Saddullah, a 15-year-old who goes by one name, also had made the journey from North Waziristan. He lost an eye and both legs in a drone strike last year, near Mir Ali town, he said. Three family members died, including an uncle who used a wheelchair. He said that instead of his three relatives, it was reported at the time that the strike killed three Taliban commanders.

"I was drinking tea with my family ... when it struck," said the shy 15-year-old, who now walks on prosthetic legs.

There was another drone strike Friday, adding to the 107 already recorded this year, according to a tally by the New America Foundation, an independent research organization based in Washington. That compares with 53 hits in 2009 and 34 in 2008. Of the strikes this year, 97 percent have been in North Waziristan, where a witch's brew of jihadist groups are based, including the Haqqani network, possibly the most effective insurgent outfit in Afghanistan.

Since the strikes began in 2004, 1,286 to 1,981 people have died in the bombardment, according to the New America Foundation. At least 32 senior al Qaida, Afghan Taliban or Pakistani Taliban commanders were killed in those strikes. Many of the rest would be midlevel militants and foot soldiers. It's broadly thought that the strikes are often accurate, but the number of civilians who are dying, from faulty intelligence or collateral damage, is unknown.

Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, a U.S.-based human rights group, said in a report this week that unnamed U.S. officials had put civilian deaths from drone strikes at 20 to 30 since the beginning of last year. Yet CIVIC's own small sample of nine strikes uncovered 30 civilian deaths, including at least 14 women and children.

The U.S. estimates of civilian casualties are far too low, said Christopher Rogers, Pakistan field fellow at CIVIC. "There's no accountability, no one is keeping count of the civilian deaths and no compensation is paid."

I guess innocent Pakistani casualties from drone attacks is just the kind of "data" the "data-driven" president doesn't want tracked or released.

As Americans danced over the news of the death of Bin Laden a few weeks back, I couldn't help but think of the drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the innocent people killed in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, the innocents killed in the undeclared actions in places like Pakistan and Yemen, and wonder if the people in those countries wouldn't dance in the street with joy if Bush or Obama were executed the way Osama was.

I bet they would.

UPDATE:

Glenn Greenwald writes how these actions against "terrorists" perpetuate themselves and the Forever War:

The New York Times reports today:

For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy. . . .

"American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him," [the district's governor, Abdul Khalid]. said. "People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes," Mr. Khalid said.

The boy, [15], was the son of an Afghan National Army soldier . . . When morning came, an angry crowd gathered in Narra, the boy’s village, and more than 200 people marched with his body to the district center. Some of the men were armed and confronted the police, shouting anti-American slogans . . .

The police opened fire in an effort to push back the crowd to stop its advance to the district center. A 14-year-old boy was killed, and at least one other person was wounded, Mr. Khalid said. . . .

On Thursday, a night raid by international forces in Nangahar Province resulted in the death of a 12-year-old girl and her uncle, who was a member of the Afghan National Police.

There's nothing much new to say here, but every now and then, it's worth highlighting not only what we're doing, but what the results are. Just imagine the accumulated hatred from having things like this happen day after day, week after week, year after year, for a full decade now, with no end in sight -- broadcast all over the region. It's literally impossible to convey in words the level of bloodthirsty fury and demands for vengeance that would arise if a foreign army were inside the U.S. killing innocent American children even a handful of times, let alone continuously for a full decade.

It's the perfect self-perpetuating cycle: (1) They hate us and want to attack us because we're over there; therefore, (2) we have to stay and proliferate ourselves because they hate us and want to attack us; (3) our staying and proliferating ourselves makes them hate us and want to attack us more; therefore, (4) we can never leave, because of how much they hate us and want to attack us. The beauty of this War on Terror -- and, as the last two weeks have demonstrated, War is the bipartisan consensus for what we are and should be doing to address Terrorism -- is that it forever sustains its own ostensible cause.

War is Peace and Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Freedom Bombs

So glad I voted for Change We Can All Believe In - it's such a different governing style than the Compassionate Conservatism that it replaced:

Embattled Libyan despot Moammar Khadafy's youngest son and three of his grandchildren were killed Saturday in a NATO airstrike, officials said.

Sayf al-Arab Khadafy, 29, and the three unidentified grandchildren were inside a large residential villa in Tripoli when it was hit.
Khadafy was also inside the building at the time of the attack, but escaped uninjured, a Libyan government spokesman said.

Spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said the villa was attacked "with full power."

"This was a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country," Ibrahim told the BBC.

"The leader with his wife was there in the house with other friends and relatives. The leader himself is in good health, he wasn't harmed."

NATO warplanes pounded Libyan targets Saturday after Khadafy called for a ceasefire but refused to step down.

Is Khadafy and his son a murderer?

You betcha.

Should the United States be leading the NATO effort to murder him?

Uh, I can think of better things we could be doing with our time and resources.

But one corporatist president has replaced another and this is all about hanging onto the vestiges of empire.

Hope President Accountability and his kids sleep well tonight in the bosom of that empire.

Maybe they'll go and take a look at his Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow.